Daily Moscow temperature record from November 1 2009 to October 31 2010. Red and blue shaded areas represent departures from the long-term average (smooth curve) in Moscow. Temperatures significantly above the long-term average scorched Moscow for much of July and August. NOAA credit. - click to enlarge

The deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new NOAA study. And while the scientists could not attribute the intensity of this particular heat wave to climate change, they found that extreme heat waves are likely to become increasingly frequent in the region in coming decades.

The research team drew from scientific observations and computer climate models to evaluate the possible roles of natural and human-caused climate influences on the severity of the heat wave. The study was accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

“Knowledge of prior regional climate trends and current levels of greenhouse gas concentrations would not have helped us anticipate the 2010 summer heat wave in Russia,” said lead author Randall Dole, deputy director of research at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, Physical Science Division and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). “Nor did ocean temperatures or sea ice status in early summer of 2010 suggest what was to come in Russia.”

Temperatures in the upper 90s to above 100 F scorched western Russia and surrounding areas from July through mid-August, 2010. In Moscow, the long-term daily average temperatures for July range from 65-67 F; in 2010, daily average July temperatures soared up to 87. Daily average temperatures include the night. The exceptional heat over such a long duration, combined with poor air quality from wildfires increased deaths by at least 56,000 in Moscow and other parts of western Russia, according to Munich Reinsurance, and led to massive crop failures in the region.

While a contribution to the heat wave from climate change could not be entirely ruled out, if it was present, it played a much smaller role than naturally occurring meteorological processes in explaining this heat wave’s intensity.

The researchers cautioned that this extreme event provides a glimpse into the region’s future as greenhouse gases continue to increase, and the signal of a warming climate, even at this regional scale, begins to emerge more clearly from natural variability in coming decades. Climate models evaluated for the new study show a rapidly increasing risk of such heat waves in western Russia, from less than one percent in 2010, to 10 percent or more by the end of this century.

“It appears that parts of Russia are on the cusp of a period in which the risk of extreme heat events will increase rapidly,” said co-author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist, also from ESRL.

Dole called the intensity of this heat wave a “climate surprise,” expected to occur only very rarely in Russia’s current climate. With the possibility of more such events in the future, studying the Russian event better prepares scientists to understand climate phenomena that will affect the U.S. and other parts of the globe.

Map of observed global temperature anomalies for July 2010, from NOAA analyses produced by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Anomalies are determined with respective to the base period 1971 to 2000.

The team — led by Dole, Hoerling, and Judith Perlwitz from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder — sifted through long-term observations and results from 22 global climate models, looking for trends that might help explain the extraordinarily high temperatures in western Russia during the 2010 summer. They also ran atmospheric models that used observed global sea surface temperatures, Arctic sea ice conditions and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in 2010 to assess whether such factors might have contributed to the heat wave.

The heat wave was due primarily to a natural phenomenon called an atmospheric “blocking pattern”, in which a strong high pressure system developed and remained stationary over western Russian, keeping summer storms and cool air from sweeping through the region and leading to the extreme hot and dry conditions. While the blocking pattern associated with the 2010 event was unusually intense and persistent, its major features were similar to atmospheric patterns associated with prior extreme heat wave events in the region since 1880, the researchers found.

They also found that western Russia has not experienced significant climate warming during the summer season over the 130 years from 1880-2009, despite significant warming of globally averaged temperatures during that time. Such a “warming hole” is not unique to that region and is not entirely unexpected, as the Earth is not uniformly warming and experiences distinct geographic areas that may be warmer or cooler than the average trend.

“We know that climate change is not taking place at the same rate everywhere on the globe,” said Hoerling. “Western Russia is one of the parts of the world that has not seen a significant increase in summertime temperatures. The U.S. Midwest is another.”

Dole compared his team’s findings to trying to hear a quiet conversation underneath the roar of a noisy fan: a summertime signal due to climate change over western Russia was drowned out by the much larger climate “noise,” or variability, resulting from natural processes.

Authors of the new paper, “Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?” are Randall Dole1, Martin Hoerling1, Judith Perlwitz2, Jon Eischeid2, Philip Pegion2, Tao Zhang2, Xiao-Wei Quan2, Taiyi Xu2, and Donald Murray2. The team is part of a NOAA effort to better understand the underlying causes of high-impact weather and climate events, with the ultimate goal of better anticipating them.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Visit us on Facebook.

In sum: “We didn’t and couldn’t have predicted this event and it can in no way be linked to climate change, but we promise that in the future when the same thing happens it will be because of climate change. Even though to date there is no summer warming signal in this region, there will be in the future. We promise. Because we said so.”
That doesn’t even nearly pass the laughably silly claims test.

“likely to become increasingly frequent”
“could not be entirely ruled out”
“glimpse into the region’s future”
“signal of a warming climate”
“on the cusp of a period in which the risk of extreme heat events will increase rapidly”
“possibility of more such events ”
the press release may say Natural Variability is the main culprit… but almost every paragraph implies “wink wink – we all really know that global warming caused it.
Nasa should stick to space exploration. Oh wait. They crashed the satellite.

If there are regions which have not warmed then such warming as there might be is regional not global.
Furthermore if that is so you cannot deduce that there either is or will be any global warming.
So once again we have speculation on future events produced by flawed models which have shown to have no predictive power.
What balderdash these people do talk.
Kindest Regards

Let me get this straight – the heat wave in Russia occurred as a result of natural activity , but Russia is apparently on the cusp of more extreme heat waves in the future , even though it’s a “warming hole ” that hasn’t experienced any significant warming in one hundred thirty years and such “holes” aren’t unique . What are they saying ? Couldn’t we just call areas of the world that have experienced “significant” warming cool holes ?

Ok, lets see if I have this right. The event could not be predicted, no warming at least from the 1880’s when CO2 was far lower, and the weather pattern hasn’t as far back as the 1880’s but yet they can predict higher CO2 levels will cause it to appear more often. Is this what passes for reasoning today? It sounds like product placement to me.

Another AGW poster child dead. But I expect we will just keep seeing this used in a style reminiscent of Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch. Like the drowning islands or the disappearing polar bears and all that.

“NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources”
So NASA needs to stop duplicating work that’s covered by NOAA’s mission – it’s an obvious waste of taxpayer’s money.

Temperatures in the upper 90s to above 100 F scorched western Russia and surrounding areas from July through mid-August, 2010. In Moscow, the long-term daily average temperatures for July range from 65-67 F; in 2010, daily average July temperatures soared up to 87.
==========================================
Good Lord…….
…Orlando gets hotter than that and so does Atlanta…………..
I didn’t realize Russians were such woosies.

Al Gored says:
March 9, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Another AGW poster child dead. But I expect we will just keep seeing this used in a style reminiscent of Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch. Like the drowning islands or the disappearing polar bears and all that.
=============================================
Yep, heat waves….blather….floods….blather……snow….blather….etc….
Is why I’m keeping Christy’s testimony handy……“The non-falsifiable hypotheses works this way, “whatever happens is consistent
with my hypothesis.” In other words, there is no event that would “falsify” the
hypothesis. As such, these assertions cannot be considered science or in anyway
informative since the hypothesis’ fundamental prediction is “anything may happen.” In the example above if winters become milder or they become snowier, the hypothesis stands. This is not science.”“
and,“so for the enterprising individual (unencumbered by the scientific
method), weather statistics can supply an almost unlimited set of targets in which to discover a “useful” extreme event.”
For those that haven’t read it yet, his congressional testimony is full of great quotes like those.http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Energy/030811/Christy.pdf

Here are a few more ‘climate surprises’:Data in climatic records are curious, to say the least. Let us see. Since 1973 until 1978, climatologists recorded the following: The coldest winter since 1740; the driest since 1743; the mildest since 1834; the biggest drought since 1725; the warmest month of July (1976) since recordings began about 300 years ago. The extreme conditions continued with an almost nonexistent summer in Europe in 1978, followed by an extraordinarily good and dry autumn that broke all records. In January 1979, Great Britain suffered the worst winter ever recorded – 2003 was worse yet.
In January 1981, The Times of London published a headline: HUNDRED DIE WHILE COLD GRIPS THREE CONTINENTS, and reported the difficulties caused by strong snowfalls in Spain and southwest France, plus a “more than usual” bad weather in Japan and a state of emergency declared in Florida, after two days of severe frosts provoked serious damage to crops (tomatoes, citrus, and sugar cane). At this point it is worth noting that the “frost lines” (isotherms), the southern limit of frosts, annually drawn by the US Weather Service show that they have been gradually moving 150 kilometres to the south for the last 50 years or so – from Jacksonville to Orlando. You cannot grow oranges north of Orlando if you want to have a decent crop.
In those years, China suffered one of the worst climatic calamities since the civil war of the 40s. In Hubei province, 800 kilometres south of Beijing, the main problem was floods that destroyed schools, hospitals, electric utilities, bridges, roads, and 210,000 homes, causing damage estimated in economic terms at 1 billion dollars, and the loss of 2,5 million tons of grain.
In Hebei province, around Beijing itself, the problem was drought. In 1980, the rain monthly mean never went over 80% of “normal”, and in many cases didn’t even reach 30%. The losses in grain summed up to 4,5 million tons, and the level of underground water went so low that the provision of “drinkable” water was compromised. The problems for the suffering population were further exacerbated by a terrible winter. China had to resort to help from Western countries, but the trouble was they had to deal with their own problems, especially when the drought was repeated again in the USA for a second year in a row, in 1981.
From an atricle by Eduardo Ferreyra dated 16th September, 2003 at:http://www.john-daly.com/guests/jet.htm

Natural fire frequency for the eastern Canadian boreal forest: consequences for sustainable forestry
“Results showed a dramatic decrease in fire frequency that began in the mid-19th century and has been accentuated during the 20th century. Although all areas showed a similar temporal decrease in area burned, we observed a gradual increase in fire frequency from the west to Abitibi east, followed by a slight decrease in central Quebec. The global warming that has been occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age (~1850) may have created a climate less prone to large forest fires in the eastern boreal forest of North America. ”http://tinyurl.com/4nzcllh

According to a story over on Icecap, we have just had the 39th coldest winter in 117 years in the US. They have a chart up that shows a trend of -4.1 degrees F in the winter temps over the last decade. I am sure if it had been the other way, it would have been splattered all over the news. Odd that.

now it is officially peer reviewed and accepted. Maybe this will be a lesson to those in the MSM and eco blogland who immediately jump on every newsworthy weather event, and with no supporting evidence
They don’t need no stinking peer review and no supporting stinking evidence.

Interesting and enlightening! The NOAA conclusion that natural climate variability was the cause of the extreme Russian 2010 summer heat wave does not stop them from repeatedly genuflecting before the alter of AGW.
e.g: “The researchers cautioned that this extreme event provides a glimpse into the region’s future as greenhouse gases continue to increase, and the signal of a warming climate, even at this regional scale, begins to emerge more clearly from natural variability in coming decades. ”
‘It was natural variability…. but AGW will be here soon!’ Like so many of the AGW proponents, they have falsely cried ‘Wolf!’ so many times over the last 2 decades that majorities in many countries are now ‘skeptics’. The AGW faithful persist, but are approaching the end of the story where ‘The Boy That Cried Wolf’ is destroyed by his own repeated falsehoods. Even if the AGW (Another Growling Wolf?) hypothesis were somehow infallibly proven in the next 10 years, many would have difficulties believing them. They are strangled by ligatures of their own fabrication.
Happily for the denizens of Planet Earth, rigorous and open analysis of available data and reports presented at sites like WUWT indicate there is no real AGW ‘Wolf’, only the echos of the AGW proponents decades long howls of pending calamity….. and their whining for wasting yet more public funding.

Let’s see – Western Russia is a ‘warming hole’ (is that a new one?) and New Zealand and the United States have not experienced any warming. Are there any other restricted areas that have not experienced warming according to the climate records that can be added to these ‘few’ exceptions to the trend? How is Ye Merry Olde England (sorry – the British Isles) faring? Any sudden warming to report? Scandinavia? If the noise to signal ratio for warming is too great to detect in Russia, why is this noteworthy only for that area? Wow! What a pile of end products of the digestive process – to add to the already deposited mountains of this stuff out there already.

“Maybe this will be a lesson to those in the MSM and eco blogland”
Surely this extends further than that, climate scientists have been pushing this idea as well. Trenberth was promoting the idea that these events were linked to climate change back in late January at the AMS conference.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/26/trenberth-at-ams-defends-himself-against-deniers/
That was 2 weeks after the Queensland floods and probably before all the data had even been collected.
I think the talk of extremes and climate change has been a powerful arguement (maybe that’s because I live in Australia). But I think it’s definitely had some tractions. It’s well worth exploring whether this is science or opportunism.

NOAA’s mission is quite amply indicated by the clever idea of regional “cool holes” on an ostensibly warming globe. In other words, don’t look for global warming where station coverage is reasonably dense. Look for it in regions where it’s sparse and the only records of adequate length (>100yrs) come from urban, or otherwise tainted, stations.
Even the attribution of increased Russian deaths to last summer’s heat wave is misleading. As reported in the Moscow press, the majority of those deaths were the result of DROWNINGS of INEBRIATED swimmers in lakes and rivers, to which many city dwellers took to escape the heat. Vodka, after all, is a cold-weather drink.

So NOAA says the Russian heat wave was not due the GHG’s! I can hardly believe it.
All this time, I thought NOAA was part of a dishonest conspiracy to persuade people that AGW was a big problem, in order to get more cash for its scientists, and more power for the government. Now they allow something like this to be published.
On the other hand, maybe these are just some honest scientists who flew under the radar to get their work published. We will have to watch out to see if there is some retribution against them. We all now what has happened to Art Robinson’s kids.
/sarc off

It seems to me that the real takeaway from the series of european weather events over recent decades is that extended time living under top down structured, highly collectivized forms of governmental entities is extremely dangerous to one’s long term survivability. The massive amounts of increased deaths from the heatwaves in Paris some years ago and Moscow last year and the widespread chaos generated by the winter weather of a number recent years indicate a population that is losing all capability to adapt to its environment, even when personal survival is at stake.
The temps in both of those heatwaves were definitely extreme enough to be quite miserable, but relative to temps that are routinely dealt with by populations in other areas of the planet, they were hardly exceptional and certainly should not have been anywhere near as deadly as they were claimed to be.
Having personally dealt with the dangers of living and working in temperature extremes well beyond what occurred in Paris and Moscow I realize those dangers are real, but also that, other than a good supply of drinking water and perhaps a good fan and a little common sense, not much else is required to ensure your survival through such an event. You may be quite miserable for the duration, but in what are supposedly highly developed modern societies, death from such events should only be an issue for those who already dancing at its door.
The abysmal response and ensuing chaos that resulted from recent winters , which were unusual but hardly unprecedented even at the local level, let alone relative to the global scale, are further evidence that decades of living with bureaucrats providing and deciding for nearly every fundamental aspect of your life, leads to a population that is a poor bet in the Darwinian lottery.
The sad irony of it all is that we have been hectored for decades that the only way to save ourselves and the planet from this faux climate crisis is to expand this soul sucking system to a global scale and surrender control of it, not just to any random bunch of vampire bureaucrats, but to the all time record holders for most corrupt, least efficient, and least adaptable of the whole sorry brotherhood. The peerless putzes from the UN, the IPCC, the EU, and the international diplomatic community. By all means, let’s hand over control of the planet and our lives to a fraternity of dumba**es whose intellectual comrades at arms allowed the most significant major population centers in Europe and Asia to descend into chaos and mass death based on relatively unexceptional weather events. What could possibly go wrong?

Mike says:
March 9, 2011 at 3:53 pm
@ DesertYote says: March 9, 2011 at 3:27 pm
So, you like science when it says what you want to believe and dismiss if you do not like the results. That is not skepticism.
============================================
This could be fun, we can have dueling science depts. What are the odds that both NOAA and our Met office friends are correct? Is one of them just babbling and the other actually engaged in science?
From your article quoted,“Using a threshold for mean summer temperature that was exceeded in 2003, but in no other year since the start of the instrumental record in 1851,…”
Now, where have I just recently read something all sciency and stuff that may be relevant to this??? Where? Oh, yeh, Dr. Christy in putting any validity to the “first time evuh” in such a long time. Which, apparently was the criteria used by Stott and others. For these purposes, you can exchange 130 years for 150.
Dr. Christy…….“….In other words, the set of the measured extreme events of the small climate history we have, since about 1880, does not represent the full range of extreme events that the climate system can actually generate. The most recent 130 years is simply our current era’s small sample of the long history of climate. There will certainly be events in this coming century that exceed the magnitude of extremes measured in the past 130 years in many locations. To put it another way, a large percentage of the worst extremes over the period 1880 to 2100 will occur after 2011 simply by statistical probability without any appeal to human forcing at all. Going further, one would assume that about 10 percent of the record extremes that occur over a thousand-year period ending in 2100 should occur in the 21st century.”

BTW, the graph provides a seldom seen indication of how surface temperature eventually reverts back to the climatic “norm ,” despite very severe (>10K) departures at a deeply continental location. It also shows the high day-to-day variability, which is not entirely adequately supressed by simple monthly averages. This introduces non-negligible aliasing into the data that forms the customary cornerstone of climatic time-series.

The warm zone and the simultanious cold zone in Russia last summer were caused by insufficent carbon taxes in the USA.
NOAA now saying otherwise is also being caused by insufficent carbon taxes in the USA, and the funding cuts being planned to deal with the absence of carbon taxes.
It appears that CO2 causes global while funding cuts reduce global .
We must not completely cut off all funding or we will get another ice age.
Carbon taxes appears to be a more powerfull ‘forcing’ agent than even CO2.
Elections have consequences.

@LattitudeI didn’t realize Russians were such woosies.
Please don’t jump to conclusions. It’s what one has become acclimatized to. When I was stationed in Nevada in the `80’s I arrived in August on the day many cities in Oregon, California, and Nevada recorded all time record high temperatures. Fallon NAS recorded 106F. I thought I was going to die. For the rest of the month the hi temps were 102-104 I felt like I was in an oven. The following summer when I had had time to acclimatize, the daily highs were again in the 100-104 range but while it felt hot it didn’t feel like an oven. If your normal summer daily mean temps are 65-67 and the mean temps rise to 86F that is a huge difference and a reall stress on the body.

The figure, Daily Moscow temperature record from November 1 2009 to October 31 2010, also shows extreme cold in Dec and January the winter prior. How many Russians died at that time from extreme cold? (Answer not expected…just saying.)
Well at least this story is one more thing to throw back at the warmists who use this (and other recent events) as “proof. “

For a moment I had hopes that NOAA was having one of its rare truthful moments, but it segued so fast into the “CC’s gonna make it happen more often” schtick that I was quickly disabused.
I really have to wonder if they’re succeeding in conning themselves, or if it’s all deliberate manipulative misinformation.

“The researchers cautioned that this extreme event provides a glimpse into the region’s future as greenhouse gases continue to increase, and the signal of a warming climate, even at this regional scale, begins to emerge more clearly from natural variability in coming decades.”
They just can’t keep from making nonsensical statements like this, can they?

‘Cool holes’ – wow! That sounds real sorta sciency – can we buy these ‘cool holes’ to take home and thus avoid spending money on a new refirgerator? Or has NOAA started offering work placements to failed students of high school English?
I am initially quite impressed, but what could have been a well-written climate science paper was downgraded by the above and by the usual statutory inclusions about how the world is about to start warming, but the authors can’t quite discern the warming signal in the data yet…

Here’s letter I just sent to the NYT’s public editor:
Sir,
Now that a peer reviewed paper is out demonstrating the Russian heat wave of last summer was caused by natural climate variability, will you be printing something
to that effect? It was a major piece you published, on the first page I believe it was and continuing on at great length about the possibility that the heat wave was caused by global warming.
Of course, you won’t, but the question is why not?
I mean, if the question was important enough to devote all that space to it in the first place, isn’t the definitive answer now that we have it, at least as important? The answer is obvious. So I ask again, why not devote some space to it?
Because you very likely will not, one can only conclude that it’s ok for you to print speculative articles that generally support your position on global warming, but definitely not ok to report actual facts when those facts do not line up with that position.
As I recall, your piece was filled with speculation and personal opinion from climate scientists whose funding and opportunity for advancement is dependent on their embrace of AGW. Perhaps that might be worth an article in itself.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/09/noaa-findsclimate-change-blameless-in-2010-russian-heat-wave/

What a strange paper. While saying that global warming was not the cause of the Russian heat wave, there are paragraphs that imply that global warming will cause more of these heat waves in the future.
I think I understand how this happens. The government agencies I was a contractor to, all had supervisiory review.
Here is what I can see happening. Working level meteorologists, under contract to NOAA, find that the heat wave had nothing to do with global warming. They write up a report that says so. NOAA supervisory review says “Whoa, this not politically correct under the currrent Adminstration. You have to tie in global warming.” The meteorologists say ” No way, this is what we found and we aren’t changing it.” NOAA then says “If want us to permit you to publish a paper on this work [many contracts have that requirement] you will add a couple paragraph about how global warming could cause more of this type heat wave in the future, and we will be co-authors of the paper.”
Thus, the paper is a hybrid of factual meteorology and political propaganda.
“

I thought the NOAA was in on the scam? Why would they present the evidence that you are using unless they really are just honest scientists?
Why do you only believe them when their science agrees with your politics?

Someone needs to ask the NOAA scientists that gave that opinion if they know what a methane hydrate. Russia is full if them when they dissociate they release temendous heat. My opinon is that that is what caused their record heat. That kind of heat occuring where it normally does not can not be accused without deliniating a source.

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